Singapore General Election 2011: Good Job Singaporean!!

Finally, after more than 4 decades as a nation, Singapore residents realize and show their government how they feel which is something they did not manage to do for the last 15 times.

Singapore government is not a bad government. There are countless governments that are way worse than them.

However that's not the point. The point is government is inefficient and the smaller the government, the better that nation will be.

We all know that Singapore government is among the biggest government in the world for their nation and the closest to socialism for a democratic government. They control most of the resources of Singapore through their massive state owned firm called Temasek group which hold most of the blue chip firms of that nation. As a result, Singapore government spend around 75% on operating spending and the rest on development spending since 1965 (the last budget, budget of 2011 - 73.8% on operating spending and the rest on development spending).

This scenario can happen primarily of the "amazingly" high wages received by Singapore public servant. As we all known (look at my previous post), Singapore prime minister, Lee Hsien Loong, is the highest earning executive political leader in the world with US$3,122,982 ( S$/US$ = 0.807 as of today) which is ridiculous for an economy that only has an annual GDP of US$ 245 Billion (2010). That is especially ridiculous when that data is compared to the wages of other political leader around the world (refer to my earlier post).

Furthermore, Singapore economy are not as well maintained as many people thinks. Refer to the Macroeconomic objectives, we can see why:

1) Stable economy growth.

Singapore economy are growing fast but not stable. Refer to subprime crisis of 2007/8, their economy shrank more than 10% which is an indicator of poor and unstable economy (compare to their nearest economy, Malaysia, which only shrank by 3.5%). This is mainly due to their dependency to international trade and amazingly high labour and capital mobility which may be good during healthy economy scenario but not during crisis.

2) High employment.

Singapore unemployment rate in 2010 was 3.1% which is around the same Malaysia (3.4%) and much lower than unemployment rate of 8.9% for US during the same period.

3) Price stability

Singapore inflation rate in 2010 was 2.8% which is slightly higher than most economies during the same period but not significantly. (Malaysia = 0.6%)

4) External Balance.

Singapore is excellent in international trade. The Balance of Payment of Singapore for 2010 recorded a surplus of around S$57 billion. The current account excel with surplus of more than S$67 billion. This is an indicator that Singapore net export is superbly contributing to their economy.During the same period, balance of payment of Malaysia is around RM80 billion surplus.

Equally distribution of wealth, high productivity, sound currency do not yield excellent result for Singapore too. Singapore is not particularly good with Gini coefficient (indicator of income gap) of 42.5 which is the highest in Asia beside Hong Kong (higher Gini coefficient = higher income gap). Malaysia has Gini of 37.9 which is way better than Singapore. Amazingly 42.5 is even worse than many poor third world nations such as Trinidad and Tobago (40.3), Sri Langka (41.1), and cambodia (40.7).

High productivity of labour also does not shine for Singapore as one third of Singapore population are foreigners and majority of that are from Malaysia. As a result, productivity of labour in Singapore is insignificant.

Sound currency. Singapore dollar is a resilient currency against major currencies in the world including USD, Euro and Pound but it is not particularly brilliant compared to major asia currencies such as Ringgit, Rupiah and Baht. From January 2006 until May 2011, SGD appreciates between 0-6 percent against China RMB, Malaysia Ringgit, Cambodia Riel, Indonesia Rupiah and Thai Baht.

So, Singapore economy are not particularly and significant better than their neighbour such as Malaysia but yet the Prime minister of Singapore receives 40,700 percent higher wages than Malaysia prime minister (US$ 7640). This is clearly the sign of socialism or communism where Government control majority of resources and private sectors are discriminated.

TO CONCLUDE, WELL DONE SINGAPOREAN IN THE LAST GENERAL ELECTION. WHETHER YOU DECREASE THE MAJORITY OF THE RULING PARTY BECAUSE YOU SEE THE PROBLEM FACED BY SINGAPORE IS NOT IMPORTANT. THE POINT IS PAP NOW KNOW THAT SINGAPOREAN STARTED TO CHANGE. THE PROCESS MAY TAKE TIME BUT EVENTUALLY THE RULING PARTY WILL NOT ACT AS A SOCIALISM GOVERNMENT AND THIS WILL SURELY BE A POSITIVE CHANGE FOR SINGAPORE